Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (jenna bush book club txt) 📗

protégée has dedicated to him. He even manages to send friends several copies of the achievement she calls ‘the most mature of my works, and the one into which my highest convictions upon Life and Art have entered’.

Elizabeth’s Poems (Fourth Edition) is published on 1 November; a fortnight later, on 15 November, Aurora Leigh appears. It’s issued simultaneously in New York by C. S. Francis, who has in the past pirated her work and ‘is said to have shed tears over the proofs .. (perhaps in reference to the hundred pounds he had to pay for them)’, as she mordantly comments. The book is an instant success. ‘All the best people shout […] rapturously’, as John Ruskin notes in the course of two letters buzzing with enthusiasm:

I think Aurora Leigh the greatest poem in the English language: unsurpassed by anything but Shakespeare—not surpassed by Shakespeare[’]s sonnets—& therefore the greatest poem in the language.

Which may be a touch overstated, but puts a finger on why Aurora Leigh is so important: it is ‘the first perfect poetical expression of the Age’. This is not just down to the fresh Victorian language (not yet a contradiction in terms). The story of conflicting models of duty and vocation speaks to contemporary concerns. It’s also a vivid exploration of changing ideas about womanhood. Both its dramatisation of forced prostitution, refusing, like ‘The Runaway Slave’, to blame the victim of rape, and its advocacy of an unconventional but stable family unit in which to bring up the child of that rape, are provocatively up to the minute. Its final vision of building a new Jerusalem is deeply, fashionably Christian – yet also the contemporary secular vernacular in a Britain still proud of the novel feats of manufacture and engineering that its Industrial Revolution has ushered in.

Leigh Hunt, too, sends Elizabeth twenty admiring pages. Though many of the nearly eighty reviews the book receives – in France, Italy, and Ireland as well as in Britain and America – comment on the rarity of the verse novel genre, they’re mostly enthusiastic. First out of the gate, five days after publication, The Globe and Traveller decides, ‘ “AURORA LEIGH,” MRS. Browning’s new poem, is a wealthy world of beauty, truth, and the noblest thoughts, faiths, hopes, and charities that can inform and sanctify our human nature’, while the Edinburgh Weekly Review sees it ‘marking an epoch in literature, for it is, in many respects, an innovation on long-accepted uses in poetry.’ In The Athenaeum, H. F. Chorley says that ‘our greatest English poetess of any time has essayed […] to blend the epic with the didactic novel’ in:

her contribution to the chorus of protest and mutual exhortation, which Woman is now raising, in hope of gaining the due place and sympathy which, it is held, have been denied to her.

Although declaring the book’s advocacy of women writers ‘unnatural’, he concludes that for some readers it will afford ‘almost a scriptural revelation’ – and so it proves, particularly among writing women.

Elsewhere, the New-York Daily Times calls Elizabeth’s blank verse ‘a phenomenon. Pure, simple, lively, flexible, it is such verse as no living pen can command in greater perfection.’ But it’s that new fictional form blending epic poetry with the novel that is Aurora Leigh’s most radical adventure and greatest achievement. Coventry Patmore, in a lengthy essay in the North British Review making clear his reservations about both this genre and what he sees as a great deal of hasty, under-polished writing throughout the poet’s oeuvre, clarifies the nature of this accomplishment: ‘There is a vital continuity, through the whole of this immensely long work.’ This sense of ‘disciplined energy, that unflagging imagination, which were necessary for the composition of the greatest poem ever written by woman’, is taken up by the Daily News. The Albion is ‘mastered […] by the form and beauty of the whole’. And so on.

Perhaps predictably, it’s George Eliot, writing in the Westminster Review, who best gets the ‘grand source of the profound impression produced in us’ by Aurora Leigh’s integration of form with content: ‘the idea of ample being’. Turning the role of ‘poetess’ from a handicap to a strength, Elizabeth is:

perhaps, the first woman who has produced a work which exhibits all the peculiar powers without the negations of her sex; which superadds to masculine vigour, breadth, and culture, feminine subtlety of perception, feminine quickness of sensibility, and feminine tenderness.[…] Mrs. Browning has shown herself all the greater poet because she is intensely a poetess.

What is the high tide of a life, and how do we know when we’re afloat on it? By the time Aurora Leigh appears, the Brownings are back in Casa Guidi. Travelling their usual route via Paris, Dijon, Marseille, Genoa and Livorno, they arrived home on 30 October. The first months of 1857 are defined by the book’s continued success. It’s in its third edition by March. Harriet Beecher Stowe visits Casa Guidi in April; the meeting of these two famous literary women abolitionists another confirmation of Elizabeth’s international standing. But as ever the private human experience is different. There’s artistic esprit de l’escalier:

There has been an enormous quantity of extravagance talked & written on [Aurora Leigh…]. I wish it were all true. But I see too distinctly what I ought to have written—Still, it is nearer the mark than my former efforts .. fuller, stronger, more sustained, .. and one may be encouraged to push on to something worthier: for I dont feel as if I had done yet—no indeed.

And there’s the ever-present threat of mortality. Treppy dies on 9 March. Though she was eighty-eight, and dementia had made her increasingly remote, Elizabeth’s mourning for her is heartfelt.

But it is upstaged five weeks later when she endures a far more complex loss. On 17 April 1857 Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett dies, and takes with him any hope of reconciliation. For the last couple of years Elizabeth has understood it would end this way. When Papa rebuffed her in summer 1855